Stop Telling Women to Apologize for Apologizing

A cool thing to do lately is tell women to change the way they speak. How does a woman speak, exactly? A woman, I've read, speaks in diction peppered with empty "I'm sorry"s and a lot of qualifiers that make her sound like she hates herself a little bit. Where a man might say, "Men are bad," a woman, supposedly, would say, "Sorry, but I justfeel like men are kind of bad!!"

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One study did show that women tend to apologize more than men and use more qualifiers instead of making straightforward statements. But the argument here is that, if women could just stop adding extraneous, weak-sounding words into their speech, they might be more successful. Removing "sorry"s and "just"s from all your emails will solve the gender wage gap. In fact, someone believed in the power of direct speech so fervently, they recently created a Google Chrome plugin that underlines these allegedly weak words in emails, like they're typos. The plugin is called Just Not Sorry, and it encourages users to "be more successful in 2016" by signing a pledge to only use "sorry" in an email when they mean it and therefore be a more effective communicator.

Of course this is a generalization. Not every single woman you encounter in life will decorate her language with a lot of "likes," or say "I'm sorry" when you spill coffee on her lap. And, as Ann Friedman notes in her great piece about what it means when we critique women's speech, men are also guilty of the same vocal ticks. But that doesn't stop the constant criticism of female speech.

A Pantene commercial from 2014 that shows women with shiny hair needlessly apologizing for little things, like stealing the covers or popping into an office, is part of what spurred this frenzy. Watch it here:

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When I first saw the commercial and read all the pseudo-empowering headlines that told me my problems would disappear if I closely monitored the way I spoke and wrote, I thought, Hey, yeah! This is feminism. I'm a woman, and I'm not going to apologize for existing anymore. But then there were more headlines, and more headlines, and an incident in which a man told me, IRL, not to apologize for something, and then the Chrome plugin, and then I started to feel ill.

Like Friedman, and more recently Jessica Grose, wrote, telling women to treat certain words like they're typos isn't a way of empowering women — it's a way of telling them to fix a problem that actually belongs to listeners who view women as weaker and less confident. "Asking women to modify their speech is just another way we are asked to internalize and compensate for sexist bias in the world," Friedman wrote. "We can't win by eliminating just from our emails and like from our conversations."

Compare that to what Tami Riess, the mind behind the Just Not Sorry plugin, wrote in her Medium post about her thought process in building the app. "When someone uses one of these qualifiers, it minimizes others confidence in their ideas," she wrote. Now read it again, only this time, replace "someone" with "a woman," and "others" with "men."

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Unlike the humans who use them, words do not have a gender or physical attributes, like strength or weakness. "Sorry" and "just" and "like" and "I feel" are not bad, or only for women. Men say them too. We just only notice these words when women say them, not because women say them more, but because we're painstakingly critical of women, in general.

As Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Amherst University and author of You Just Don't Understand, told me, when women use these words, people criticize them for being too self-deprecating. But she said that same behavior serves as beneficial for men. "If a man speaks in a way that's self-deprecating, that might actually work in his favor, he sounds approachable," she said. "But women are approachable and unimposing by definition."

Tannen also said that women can't win even when they try to change their speech; when women she's spoken to have tried to delete the "sorry"s and "just"s from their vernacular, they've been criticized for not being "feminine" enough. "I have definitely talked to some women who tell me they had to add those things to their speech so they would get a better reaction," Tannen said. While people are telling women to stop using the extra words, they also expect to hear them from the mouths of women. It's lovely and feminine, it's womanspeak.

In the time it might take me to read back through a casual email to my editor, or a source, or any other living person, I could be getting more done. It takes maybe 0.01 seconds to type "just" where a "just" doesn't need to be. It would take another 20 seconds of scanning and unnecessary self-loathing to remove those "just"s and press send. Over the course of an average workday, that's, like, full minutes I could spend plotting my next career move or doing something actually productive.

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Telling women how to speak, or which words to remove from their daily lexicon, isn't empowering. It's sexism. In an ABC News broadcast from 2014 that discussed the Pantene "Sorry Not Sorry" commercial, a woman reporter (in response to a male anchor) laughed and said, "We're being called out on this one" before launching into the segment. It makes my stomach turn to watch.

No — we're not being called out. We're being duped and cut short. Apologizing isn't what keeps women out of high-powered jobs they deserve. It's the idea that women are weaker and therefore their words are weaker. Removing "just" from your email isn't going to fix that. Fighting back against sexism will.

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